Re: Subwindow terminology

From:

martin rudalics

Subject:

Re: Subwindow terminology

Date:

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 09:50:44 +0100

User-agent:

Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (Windows/20090302)

> So sometimes a child window is not necessarily a descendant window? If
> so, that's just horrible.
Some child windows have been adopted by their parents, others not.
What's so horrible about that? Alternatively, we would have to demand
that a fresh frame always has a parent window with one child window
which doesn't strike me as very useful.
> If you don't want to change the "subwindow"
> terminology, maybe "child window" should become "immediate subwindow" or
> "direct subwindow."
I already regret that I started to describe the window tree at all. Do
you think that I did not consider alternative ways of doing that?
Window trees are described in terms of four well known concepts - root
window, parent window, child window and subwindow. All these relations
have been in the Emacs sources for years (think of `frame-root-window',
the parent and vchild/hchild fields in the window structure, or the
routine delete_all_subwindows) and I don't have much interest changing
anything here. I didn't use the terms "ancestor" and "descendant"
because these would introduce a genealogical connotation that doesn't
exist.
The terms "sibling" and "combination" are occasionally useful for
describing the behavior of splitting and deleting windows. In any case,
these terms have been widely used in Emacs 23 so I don't see a reason to
change that.
In addition I used the term "internal" for windows that are not visible
on the screen and "live" or "leaf" for visible windows. I don't like
the term "live" for the latter but this has been in Emacs ever since, so
there's little hope to change this. We could abandon the term "internal
window" in favor of "parent window" as Stefan suggested but this would
lead to a connotation like "parent windows are not live" which I don't
like (at least not as an explicit dichotomy).
martin